Sometimes I am (probably) more than a little slow to pick things up. These aren't objects that I've dropped. No. These are things that people write or sometimes say. Takes me a little while to pick up the gist of things. This is not due to a bad education, either. I had a very good Grammar School education thank you, even involved some classics along the way (Latin was just awful).

However. Reviews, or what's probably more to the point, reviewers, is what I'm meant to be ranting about. Reviews have been around for many, many years of course. Ever since people started entertaining other people, there have been the Critics and therefore the written reviews.

Before the dawn of the Internet (and blogging) the review was usually written in newspapers, by usually the same people. So you wanted to see a show, read the review in the newspapers, then make your own mind up (based on the information written by the reviewer) whether you want to see it or not. That's pretty much stayed the same for many years, television reviews were commonplace (and probably still are) in the popular press.

Now, of course, the Internet brings a whole new medium to the review process. Blogging, microblogging and the accessiblility of the Internet from almost any device nowadays means that anyone can be a reviewer or a blogger. Prime example is me blogging here, of course.

However, along with that accessiblility and indeed ability to write anything about anything comes the Internet Search Engine. This is the thing that sends out crawler robots (or bots, as they're known) to bugger off around the Internet and trawl all of these websites, seeking out the words then duly filing them back at base. Usually "base" in most cases is one of (or all of) the big three search engines, Google, Bing (used to be Microsoft MSN) and Yahoo.

These very words that I've written so far will be "botted" filed and catagorised at some point in the very near future, waiting for the day that someone types the phrase "reviewer" into Google to then return the result in the search page list. OK, so it may feature as result no. 123,456 but it will be there.

So those reviews written on blogs, forums, webpages etc are catagorised, filed and readily available should the great unwashed (i.e. me) wish to search for it. All pretty passive and somewhat unobtrusive unless you're looking.

Then there are the websites that specialise in reviews, or at least have sections of their web-presence that will review many programmes, films, games etc. employing (or at least taking submissions from) teams of many reviewers.

These are the websites that have the marketing - maybe not paid marketing such as advertisements - but viral marketing (such as Twitter) and social marketing (such as Facebook and other Social Networking sites). The uptake of these Social Networking sites has really taken off in the last couple of years - and coupled with the portability nowadays of internet connected devices - there are several ways that one can make one's presence, or product, known to many people.

Posting to Facebook, for instance, can reach many people at one time - sometimes thousands - providing the Facebook page has been set up correctly and has fans (or a following), of course.

The most recent development though, is the viral market. This is the "art" of setting up a microblogging account with a microblogging provider (such as Twitter) and letting the fans or followers, do the marketing for you - the prime example of this is a retweet. People follow people, who follow people etc. A single retweet can reach many more people than a basic social networking page and can gain you "business" (whatever it might be) along the way.

So - this extremely long-winded and probably over-verbose wordage brings me back to the  reviews themselves. It's not uncommon nowadays (through the above devices) for a review to reach many many people. Thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of people at any one time, this number could grow over a number of days....

Let's say that you're a reasonably high-profile website that has a television reviews section. Let's say that you use social marketing and viral marketing to advertise your site's latest post. Let's say that you employ, or utilise, a set of reviewers to review TV programmes for you. Then we are set.

Oh but wait! (As seems to be fairly common nowadays) The reviewer that is reviewing a particular TV show doesn't like it and writes a pretty negative review. The review is submitted and then published - the marketing engine swings into action and a few minutes or hours later there's hundreds of hits on your website reading your review. Job's a good 'un - brilliant.

Or is it? Yes, it's reached many people, yes you have several thousand hits on your website that lead to other pages, yada, yada, yada.

Sometimes, the reviewer makes good points. Of the reviews that I read (that are marketed in this fashion), I would say that 50% of them make good points. I may not necessarily agree with those points - but that won't stop me returning to the review site to read something else by that Author.

(Remember the review is the opinion of that particular Author, regardless of whether they like the TV prog or film being reviewed, it's my decision whether I like it or not and my choice whether I continue to watch it or not.)

So, the point of my rant is this. If you're going to be marketed and read by several thousand people have the bloody courtesy to at least make sure your spelling, grammar and THE NAMES OF THE ARTISTS are correct! If you can't be bothered to even look up how to spell the name of the character - and worst still - the name of the actor playing the character, then please don't bother. It just spells (no pun intended) incompetance - especially if you're writing a negative review of something.

I have no idea how these people even get to submit either! Surely there is a process in place that allows an editor, or at least some other person to check the kind of thing that you were supposed to have learnt at school? Yes? Obviously not. It is bastard annoying.

If you're a high-profile website doing big marketing, you should be checking this sort of thing yes?

Obviously, the odd typo will appear (and Gawd Knows I am as guilty of that as any other person!) but please. It wouldn't be so bad if it was just the one review, but I've read three or four now that are negative (in some cases really bad!) reviews where spelling is off and - in one particular case - the actor's name was wrong.